Open Source is revolutionizing the way businesses function – irrespective of the company size or industry. Since the open source policy has been defined by the Indian government, companies in India are coming together to promote the use of open source and its relevance for growing businesses. The burgeoning SMB base and an exponential rise in the number of start-ups have led to increased open source adoption across the board.

This is further complemented by established enterprise software companies such as Oracle, in helping bring supported products and services based on open source projects such as Event Hub Cloud Service – that provides managed Kafka service and Datahub Cloud Service – which is a managed service for NoSQL databases, such as Cassandra.

How is Open Source assisting organizations to drive digital transformation? Please highlight drivers of the Open Source market in India.

The use of open source software (OSS) in the key areas of ICT implementation has helped extensively in adopting open source technologies across the world. As per Gartner, 70 percent of new applications will run on open source databases in 2018.

The Government is one of the key drivers of open source software. The adoption of open source software in e-Governance has encouraged several government/public departments to bring out policy framework/guidelines in this area. The government sector has started recognizing the value of open source software and noticeable steps have been taken in implementing open source initiatives to realize better returns for citizens and organizations.

What new Open Source technologies are trending with Indian developers and why?

In the cloud economy, businesses are always searching for innovative ways to increase their developer velocity and agility, to accelerate digital transformation. Open, container native technologies are gaining rapid popularity amongst developers as they understand the need to move fast, build for the cloud, but retain the flexibility to run where the business or workloads require. They are relying on open, cloud-neutral, and community-driven container-native software stacks that enable them to avoid cloud lock-in and to run in a true hybrid mode – so they can use the same stack in the cloud – for that matter on any cloud – as they run on-premises.

In my view, 3 key trends in the Indian developer landscape are below:

Cloud Native development using Microservices set to go mainstream: Microservices based development is no longer a buzzword, but a best practice to deliver products quickly to the business in the digital era. This boosts agility, giving enterprises a significant competitive edge

Real chatbot applications with natural language processing will become the norm in 2018: Using chatbots, existing applications can be extended to newer channels, while newer applications can interact in novel ways

node.js and Javascript continue to build a massive following: Javascript has become the ubiquitous language with both client and server-side programming capabilities. Most new applications are built using javascript frameworks such as React, Angular etc. with node.js at the backend. Polyglot applications continue to remain a focus for developers looking to choose from a multitude of programming languages.

Gartner predicts that the scope of machine learning and artificial intelligence will expand in 2018 simply because they have the ability to learn and improve from experience without a programmer explicitly coding the instruction. Other trends like OpenStack, XaaS, Containers, Blockchain, Cognitive Cloud, IoT are further pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and these will continue to evolve in 2018. OpenStack is gaining acceptance as both developers and enterprises are facing issues in managing cloud computing systems.

The benefits of deploying open source technology are multifold, primary ones being security and innovation. The first one comes from the fact that you can always audit the source code of an application that you are using and the second one, from the fact that open source projects generally start as a passion of one person or a group of like-minded people.

At Oracle, we’re embracing and offering open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment. Today, many customers are using Oracle and supported open source technologies in mission-critical environments and are reaping the benefits of lower costs, easier manageability, higher availability, and reliability along with performance and scalability advantages.

We contribute as a leader and as a worker bee to open source communities. We are a member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process. Oracle employees contribute to efforts ranging from Java and Linux to Kubernetes and Serverless framework. Hundreds of Oracle engineers are part of open source communities and develop code that is freely available in open source.

What’s Oracle’s commitment and role in the Open Source market?

Oracle is not only committed to enhancing many open source technologies by contributing code but is also very committed to enabling users to deploy open source in their environments. Oracle invests significant resources in testing and optimizing open source technologies in their test labs so that users can integrate well with other open and closed source solutions. In addition, Oracle offers best practices and recommendations on deploying open source solutions.

Furthermore, Oracle develops and offers open source products such as Berkeley DB, which is embedded in many popular applications both open and closed source. By making our contributions open source, Oracle ensures that the software is adopted and enhanced by the community.

Can you tell us about Oracle’s latest contributions to container-native technology, and how they are helping customers to scale their business?

As part of our commitment and contribution to container native technology, we have joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We have adopted Docker and Kubernetes as the foundation for our container native strategy. We are contributing to both these important projects. We’ve also announced three new Open Source Container Utilities – Smith, a secure micro-container builder; Crashcart, a micro-container debugging tool, and Railcar, an alternative container runtime.

One of the hottest trends of 2018 is serverless computing or functions as a service. With the recent launch of a new open source, cloud agnostic, serverless platform–Fn (https://fnproject.io), Oracle is demonstrating its commitment to the developer community by bringing such latest advancements.

Fn has a bunch of great features for development and operations. The Fn project is a container native Apache 2.0 licensed serverless platform that you can run anywhere– on any cloud or on-premises. It can let the users run their own serverless infrastructure anywhere, from your laptop to the cloud, with no vendor lock-in. It’s easy to use, supports every programming language, and is extensible.